


The Night of Fire

by Turandokht



Series: The Dominion of the Sword -- A Bellamione Tale [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Dark, Murder, Mutilation, Nuclear Warfare, Nuclear Weapons, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26566792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turandokht/pseuds/Turandokht
Summary: A series of vignettes around the start of the war, which is covered in "There Will Be Love", the main story of the Dominion of the Sword series.
Series: The Dominion of the Sword -- A Bellamione Tale [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1840054
Comments: 31
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wardown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wardown/gifts), [warthesuperior](https://archiveofourown.org/users/warthesuperior/gifts), [Suang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suang/gifts), [Xilizhra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xilizhra/gifts), [error_cascade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/error_cascade/gifts), [Arrogant_Clown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arrogant_Clown/gifts).



**Chapter One  
**

**March, 1999**

What the hell had happened to all of their plans, anyway? Where had the grand dream of the future of the world gone? They’d seized power in the United Kingdom, and then, for the past nine months, had experienced a chaos they had never imagined. Thanks to Voldemort’s appointment as his personal representative on the Muggle Front Government, Bellatrix had been the point-woman for the chaos, too.

Who knew that the other muggle governments of the world would start hitting Britain with a huge number of ‘sanctions’, international punitive laws which crashed the economy, forcing Bellatrix to form a talented body of experts to try and make the economy something called _dirigiste_ so that they didn’t have to deal with a total economic collapse of muggle Britain which would lead to widespread revolts against their rule that they weren’t in a position to deal with? Worse, this immediately threatened the prospect of a _military intervention_ against the new government, as Prince Charles’ claims started to bear more and more weight.

So Bellatrix, despite her great distaste for the terrible muggle weapons, had gone ahead and worked with her experts to come up with a plan to strengthen the nuclear deterrent. The _Resolution_ -class SSBNs had been recommissioned with indigenous nuclear warheads—though they were less powerful than the American ones they had been cut off from and now had a limited supply of on the _Vanguard_ -class—fabricated from nuclear waste from Britain’s nuclear reactors, by adjusting their operating ratio to produce enriched nuclear material for bomb-making. Two months before, this had led to a nuclear accident at Dungeness A while running the reactor hard to produce Pu-239.

Because of the reactor’s position on the Channel, the radioactive contamination had mostly hit France, which had led to the French ministry launching a raid on Britain with their Aurors and the French leading the EU into a high military alert. The dark witch had a sense of responsibility over the incident; she had personally taken charge of the emergency response, and her reward of radiation sickness from going into the hall to supervise the operations had been indescribably awful, particularly when magic was perfectly unavailing against all but the trivial symptoms.

It also had not improved Voldemort’s response to the incident. Bellatrix had been tortured by the Dark Lord for over twenty minutes with the Cruciatus Curse for that failure, though 102 muggles in the operation had been executed, with their families. But the intensity of the torture had been so terrible that her arms still twitched. In truth, though, she felt like she deserved it. She hated the threat of nuclear weapons and she felt enormously guilty at having poisoned France, veritably her second homeland, even in a relatively small measure.

The feeling she had deserved her punishment had left her morose and detached, but she still had almost total responsibility for the Muggle economy and had to keep working through it. It was absurd and insulting that a pureblood witch of her calibre and breeding was reduced to trying to tell these damnable muggle engineers and economists what to do, but there she was. Other measures for the national defence had been necessary as well. Since they had all the plans already, she had ordered the immediate production of six large air-defence frigates of the _Horizon_ type, and from the yard building HMS _Ocean,_ renewed production of the _Invincible-_ class light carrier. The Type 23 line had also been renewed and accelerated. If they needed muggle weapons, it was best to stop the muggles from invading at all, and that meant a Navy; hadn’t that _always_ been the way Britain defended herself?

Spring was coming on, and Bellatrix was glad to be leaving behind all of these muggle concerns and the stressful atmosphere of Whitehall, surrounded by muggles and wizards too arrogant to learn what they were dealing with, while half the muggles were Imperioused and the other half were terrified or the most absolutely vile kind of servile, ambitious personality which existed. She despised all of them.

Life was blossoming again in the world, and, moreover, she was heading to the Ministry Building for a late night meeting that the Dark Lord had called with little notice. It pleased her to, at that point, put aside the thoughts about all the muggle concerns she had taken up, and focus on wizarding matters, even though she had a briefing folio thicker than her thumb stuffed under her left arm in case the meeting turned to more muggle economic and military affairs; she really hoped it wouldn’t, though on the other hand, wasting another evening talking about reorganising Hogwarts when they had an _entire country_ to run would be almost as bad. Secure behind immensely powerful occlumency shields, Bellatrix sometimes dared to wonder why, exactly, her Lord was so obsessed with it, when they had a country to rule and a world to conquer. Her love for him had been sorely tried by the past nine months.

All the senior Death Eaters were there, with Voldemort at the head of the table. Bellatrix arrived on time, and curtsied in her black dress to her Lord.

“Bellatrix.” She had been punished, but it had been quickly swept under the rug by Voldemort, too. “Have a seat.”

Her seat was still at his right side. She smirked contemptuously toward the others, knowing they envied the level of power and freedom she had been granted in running Britain.

There was a girl serving them tea. She was a mudblood who should have been in Hogwarts, but now worked as a servant in the Ministry, with her tongue removed to keep her from speaking words of power that could threaten her betters; she could still do simple wordless house magic to fulfil her duties as a servant. The idea had been Rookwood’s, but Voldemort had modified it by demanding any mudbloods allowed to serve in this way have one eye struck out, so they would not be found attractive for miscegenation by pureblooded men. This entire thing made Bellatrix deeply uncomfortable; the muggleborns were awful but something about casual mutilation for servitude rang wrong. It would be better to just put them out of their misery.”

“Tonight,” Voldemort began, immediately drawing the attention of all the assembled Death Eaters, “we are going to review the plan for the next phase in our seizure of power. Yaxley will present it to us.” Voldemort leaned back to listen as the man rose, and bowed to him, before facing all of the others.

Bella couldn’t help but think behind her occlumency shields that they were now emulating the concept of a ‘briefing officer’ from the muggles. This was not a great improvement to the Wizarding World, though she couldn’t figure out how else to handle Whitehall, herself.

“During the 1950s and 1960s,” Yaxley began, “the wizarding world became aware of a powerful new weapon that the Muggles had created. Utilizing a kind of scientific alchemy based on the sun, they had created a device which could destroy an entire city, when delivered from a Muggle flying machine…”

“Nuclear weapons, you’re talking about nuclear weapons, we should know about them by now,” Bellatrix groused. She was impatient to pass the five year old explanation. She had heard that when she was twenty, and she wasn’t twenty anymore; it was part of why she was here.

Yaxley looked archly at her. “Would you like to explain, Bellatrix? We are all in this together.”

He was clearly expecting herself to humiliate herself in front of the Dark Lord, but in fact, Bella realised with a start, it was precisely because nobody had really been paying attention to what she had been doing with the muggles in Whitehall. The muggle engineers working desperately to contain the situation at Dungeness A had managed to impress upon her a reasonable understanding of nuclear physics, and Yaxley didn’t know.

 _Well, time to show the git up!_ Bellatrix got up, smiling with a ruthless grin touching ruby lips. “Right, so, nuclear weapons utilize the fundamental material principle of the universe – the transfiguration of energy into matter, and matter into energy, is a concept which is understood by the muggles. However, being useless muggles, they have absolutely no control over this transfiguration.” She slammed her hand down onto the table and everyone looked at her with a start.

“We all know what uncontained, uncontrolled magic, like that used by a mudblood, a cripple, a child, or an idiot would be. The muggles looked at the absolute limit of the universe—the moment where the material world breaks down, and only witches and wizards can understand things—and they saw this power. They can’t understand it, they can’t control it, but they can put it into a spherical metal case and throw it out of an aeroplane or a rocket,” she continued in mock sweetness, with her head twisted to the side in a grin. “A little muggle timer makes it go off. It’s set either to time or altitude. When it goes off, it just… Goes off. It takes the substance _uranium, or plutonium,_ and as long as it’s got some, it just … Keeps going off. They can’t do anything interesting with it. The only thing they’ve figured out, purely by trial and error and lots of dead muggles, is that if you stick an alchemical substance they call a ‘moderator’ into the uranium, it goes off a bit more slowly. So they do that when they stick some into a big steel drum to produce heat with. And that’s all it does. Their powerplants just _make heat._ And the bombs?” She cackled, and for a moment let them all her see a flicker of her madness.

“Well they make heat _really fast._ Fast enough to create a shock-wave which will destroy an entire city. Like Fiendfyre spreading in every direction at once. But they make something else, too. Radiation. Sleets of it. It will poison the land. You old veterans of the Knights of Walpurgis should know this well. In the 1960s and 1970s the world feared being destroyed by it—by these stupid muggles just throwing their stupid bombs around without the faintest idea of what they would do, all over some petty muggle dispute about which big muggle which get to shoot the other muggles in Czechoslovakia or something like that. Anyway, there’s no magical cure for it. And they’ve got THOUSANDS of these bombs, all just sitting around. And oh, by the way, even muggles are scared of them now. So they don’t go directly to war with other countries that have them, they rely on assassinations and proxies and what have you. I’m working on doubling our arsenal to keep the other muggles scared until we can reveal ourselves.” _Still can’t believe I’m fucking doing that._ She thought, as Bellatrix sat down with a look of triumph at having stolen Yaxley’s thunder.

“Thank you for the explanation,” Yaxley said quite stiffly. “At any rate, the reality is that these weapons are a powerful expedient to us. We have been bedeviled with the problem of how to gain control over the muggle populations of the world. There are not enough wizards— _Merlin,_ there are just eighty thousand of us in Britain, against sixty million muggles—for us to exert power over the whole of the world. Worse, of course, the reality is that the world was never made to hold more than two billion muggles, at most; and it would be better if there were only a billion and a half, really; there are presently six billion muggles in the world.”

Bellatrix was listening, somewhat distracted, having secured her triumph in the explanation which stood up Yaxley and then not really caring about whatever inane thing he was going to bring up next. Indeed, she agreed that six billion muggles was entirely too many, and a billion and a half would be nicer, but she couldn’t really think of any way to make seventy-five percent of the world’s muggle population go away…

“In fact, we have an opportunity,” Yaxley continued. “The Wizarding Ministries of the world developed spells which would protect wizards from nuclear attack. We have yet to understand a way to shield against radiation, but we can protect against the physical descent of nuclear warheads across a large part of the world, at our convenience. These spells must be executed by many wizards at once, but they allow wizarding population centres to be safe in the event of a nuclear exchange. For this reason we are confident, for example, we can make Britain, which has a large wizarding population from history and from immigration, completely immune to nuclear attack. Likewise, knowledge of the spells has been disseminated to all major wizarding communities in the world in which we have allies, and personnel under the Imperious Curse have been secured in the nuclear powers’ command and control networks around the world.”

 _Well, that’s convenient. Why do we need the nuclear deterrent after all?_ Bellatrix thought, and took some tea.

“Thus it will be easy to launch the weapons without wizarding-kind suffering. We are confident that by doing this, we can secure the elimination of three billion muggles with minimal collateral damage among the wizarding population, mostly mudbloods that intermix themselves with the muggles in some countries…”

Bellatrix jerked, and froze in place, her eyes going wide. _What did he just propose?!_ “...What did you just say, Yaxley?” She snapped. “You want to _launch the nuclear weapons_?”

There _was_ a rumble around the table, from more than just her. But it was Bellatrix who lacked any kind of restraint against saying things, and simply blurted it out, in shock and surprise.

“You’ll contaminate the world with radiation!” She continued, heedless. “It will set most of the thinking magical creatures against us, and poison our relationship with the land! And, I might add, the muggles have also prepared for this kind of war, and they will prove more resilient against it than you realise. I have watched muggles react to radiation, and they do have methods of handling it. You are using their own technology as a panacea against them, and it’s very likely to fail!”

“No, Bellatrix, it will succeed,” Voldemort’s voice cut, low and warning, against her tirade. “It is a very simple plan. The wizards will be safe. And most magical creatures like Goblins and Veela and Merfolk are all simply problems to our supremacy, anyway. I know that we had long opposed the existence of these weapons and the risk of nuclear war, as Knights of Walpurgis, and clearly you are thinking of those times. However, the times of changed. The number of muggle nuclear weapons is smaller, and they are cleaner than they were. We will have altered the targeting, to focus precisely on the elimination of muggle cities. With the muggle cities destroyed, we will more effectively control the muggle populations in the rural areas, which we need as a base of slaves for wizarding civilisation, anyway. The plan is a perfectly viable one, and I was not calling this meeting as a debate over it, but an explanation of what is going to happen very, very soon.”

Bellatrix looked in confused shock and hurt at Voldemort. Once, when he had been the amazing and charming Dark Lord of the Knights of Walpurgis, she was sure this would have been unthinkable to him. But something had changed… Hadn’t it?

Voldemort was smirking, now. "So, Bellatrix. You think of muggles as dirty animals, and their magic spawn as dirty blood. I have no doubt of that about you, you are one of my true Loyals. And here you are, complaining about killing them _enmasse_ with their own weapons. Isn't that a truly remarkable sentiment?" He looked around the table, garnering chuckles from the other Death Eaters, as more than a dozen pairs of contemptuous eyes now focused on Bellatrix.

"It's the radiation that bothers me, My Lord," Bellatrix answered, her skin hot with a flush, put out at the moment and exposed by her own Lord. She looked around for support, but only Dolohov looked uncomfortable.

"There are real risks from fallout," he acknowledged. She received no other support, when the Dark Lord had spoken.

"The targeting of the weapons will be changed, I understand, to minimise this. Again, Bellatrix, are you really feeling... Sympathetic, for these muggles?"

“No," Bellatrix answered weakly, lowering her eyes. "It's just my concerns over the radiation, you have my word. How will we take advantage of the operation, My Lord?” She finally asked, weakly.

“That's better. We are preparing the muggle Army now to invade Europe. Thanks to Dolohov’s effort had recovering multiple examples of the ancient Kaptarian Telecasters, we have a plan to control entire Armies from a single point, with the Imperious curse, the Telecaster, and the Pensieve. Many other countries will have their wizarding leadership overthrown in a coup d’etat, and their operations harmonised with our own.”

“That will still be an immensely dangerous operation, requiring magic at the front line, as our Army is small against all of Europe,” Bellatrix answered, desperate to escape this conversation. “I beg your leave to be dismissed from the leadership of the British muggle government, and placed in command of one of the Armies invading Europe.”

“Ah, Bellatrix. If you want to risk your life for me in the front line, I won’t stop you, but I’m surprised you’d accept a demotion before your peers,” he laughed, teasing her again; and there was laughter from the others at the table. "It seems a little squeamish, though."

Bellatrix could only think about Delphini, and the risks of drifting radiation across the globe. “My Lord, it is no demotion in _my_ eyes to risk my life on the front line for your cause. I would rather my wand sing my loyalty than I remain cooped up in drafty old conference rooms. I beg your leave to prove this to you at every moment henceforth.”

He sniffed in bemusement, and looked idly to his wand, as if he were considering whether or not to punish her with a well-aimed _Crucio,_ or indulgently acknowledge her request. In the end, he settled on the later. “If that’s what you want, I won’t deny it to you, Bellatrix. Go.”


	2. Larissa's War

**Moskva**

**15 March, 1999**

Though her name was quite prestigious, like anyone else in the Ministry, Larissa Sergeivna Naryshkina started out with the lowest rank. She had, after all, graduated from Koldovstoretz only a short time before. Her promotion path was marked out, certainly, but it wouldn’t happen even for a member of a “Princely Family” overnight. The days when they were automatically made Councillors of Witchcraft had long ago ended, in the Compromise with the Soviet Power.

Not that she minded. The Nizhniy Novgorod-Kitezh-Koldovstoretz, alignment conveniently situated in the middle of nowhere, didn’t have the greatest wizarding nightlife ever. Larissa was young, and she wanted to enjoy life for a while, for at least as long as was possible before her family badgered her into a marriage. 

One thing that had surprised people had been the career she had sought. The number of members of MinKol who actively sought out the uniformed services were small. With her considerable knowledge of foreign languages, and her origin in the Black Court, the Court of Koldovstoretz that specialised in the darker and Shamanistic magical arts, she had been assigned to the task-force which was tracking the rapid spread of Voldemort’s influence through the broader wizarding world. The assignment had quickly drawn her in.

Any intention to treat her job like a sinecure and enjoy the Moscow nightlife had vanished quickly in the circumstances. She might have come because she wanted to be away from the wizarding aristocracy which was concentrated in Nizhniy, Kazan and Samara, but duty, and the challenge of understanding the British totalitarian phenomenon, had driven her to put in considerable effort.  Larissa was working as an aide to the  counterintelligence  staff officer  for the Actual State Councillor, Senior Councillor  Anton Gusarov,  and her job was to assist in the plan to combat the radicalisation of Russian wizards into Voldemort’s ideology. 

And she was up late that night, drinking tea and flipping through a set of ominous reports. The counterintelligence services had been tracking a group of wizards, mostly graduates of the Durmstrang Institute with Slavic backgrounds, who had infiltrated into the territories of the Russian Ministry—the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Belarus—over the past two months. They had been making contacts with disaffected persons in the wizarding community, especially in Kiev and Minsk, but also in the old core of the Pureblood aristocracy in Russia—Larissa’s own sort of people.

So she had monitored the situation, and begun filing report after report. She had convinced Gusarov to put her in touch with the foreign bureau. They had showed a similar pattern of infiltration that their ‘illegals’, the overseas agents who operated without the permission of another country’s Ministry or its equivalent, had detected in several other countries.

Now, they had posted messages and held meetings, openly gathering the wizards along the Volga for major ceremonies and rallies—that very night. _The Ides of March. They’re likely too stupid to understand it, but someone at the top may have a sense of humour,_ she thought drolly. It seemed like too much of a coincidence, but sometimes things happened.

An autoquill began to write down a message, transmitted through the wizarding radio channels, which went to magical teletype in her office. She dropped the papers and turned; it was recording a message from the Station Chief in Nizhniy.

_The infiltrators we are monitoring have met. Their meetings are invoking the people to prepare our nuclear defence protocols._

Larissa grew for still for a moment. Then she snatched the paper from the autoquill, grabbed a set of others from her desk, and rocked to her feet quick enough to bump against it, splashing a bit of the now-forgotten tea. Her boots snapped against the tile as she walked briskly to her commander’s office. He was also up late and working late that night, with good reason, considering the circumstances. “Councillor Gusarov, Sir. We now know what the purpose of the meetings by Voldemort’s followers in Nizhniy Novgorod, in Kazan, in Samara—we now have it. They’ve been ordered to prepare the nuclear defence protocols. They’re preparing to defend the cities against nuclear attack.”

Gusarov froze at his desk for a minute, then looked up, his pair of grey eyes facing Larissa’s blue. He didn’t mock her, or question her. “Show me,” he simply ordered, in the imperative.

She put the paper down. “It matches what we know, internationally,” she added as she put to down the others from her desk. “Voldemort’s agents are mobilising a mass effort by wizards worldwide. Now we have some idea of what this is, and it matches the intention to concentrate the world’s wizarding population in a relatively small number of locations--to defend major points of wizarding populations from nuclear attack. Sir, we know he has actual control of the British nuclear arsenal.”

Councillor Gusarov pushed back from his deck and wiped his forehead. “Larissa Sergeivna, the British nuclear arsenal isn’t _large enough_ for a world-wide threat. Against Russia, yes, these preparations would be appropriate. But the Americans? The Chinese? They don’t have enough nukes, even with the buildup they commenced. And we know about the Dungeness Incident.”

Larissa went pale as she thought through the implications. “Yes, Sir, but that just means they think they can trigger a general conflict. One in which large wizarding populations will be safe, and the muggles will be die. That fits their objectives.”

“If the British launch against multiple targets, that this was initiated by the Putchist regime in London will be obviously to everyone, that will simply not happen.”

“Not unless the early warning infrastructure is initially led to misinterpret the launches,” Larissa hazarded. “Magical infiltration… They have agitators in our magical population, why not infiltrators in our muggle military forces? The State Security Bureau,” she meant the one in MinKol, whose job was exactly that, to prevent magical infiltrator of the non-magical State apparatus, “hasn’t reported anything to this monitoring project _yet,_ but that just means the enemy is successful, Sir.”

Gusarov looked at her, expressionless. Then he pushed back and stood. “Come on. We’re going to awake the Actual State Councillor and brief him.” 

“Sir!” She fell in behind him, a half step to the left and two steps behind, all regulation and precise. 

Gusarov got to the central bureau office. “Anna Igorovna, I need the Actual State Councillor’s residence contacted and His Excellency awakened—immediately. This is an urgent State Security matter.” 

Commander and subordinate, experienced leader and junior officer, man and woman, the two stood, waiting for the Actual State Councillor to arrive by the Floo network from his house. They occasionally looked at each other, and occasionally focused on the artwork on the walls, not wanting to say anything, but feeling impatient, like each moment was a deep imposition, like time was life, draining away from their fingertips imperceptibly, but with growing urgency. 

Anton Vladimirovich Vikhrov, the Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft of the Russian Federation, arrived, still buttoning the jacket of his uniform, which he was wearing instead of normal civilian wizarding robes as he might regularly. The two officers came to attention. 

“At ease. I decided we would be interacting with muggles based on the report, yes?” 

“Almost certainly, Excellency,” Gusarov acknowledged. Gesturing to Larissa, as part of Vikhrov’s staff followed them into a magically warded secure information facility, he quickly laid out the information on what they had to date, as well as the activation of the networks, and the particular kind of orders. 

Then it was Larissa’s turn to talk. “Excellency, it’s my analysis of this data that Voldemort intends to attack the muggle population of the world. This is an attempt to render the wizarding population safe during those attacks, and also, make them dependent on himself. So, it is a case of all-against-all, and we need information on whether or not the muggle early warning infrastructure in the country has been compromised. We should be expecting a nuclear attack soon.”

Vikhrov listened and looked at the documentation before him, then turned to one of his staffers. “Marina Ivanovna, present this to the State Security Bureau Staff for their assessment. And get us all ready for a meeting with the President of the Russian Federation. If the State Security Bureau agrees, we’ll be going to the Kremlin at once to make sure that the strategic forces are put on alert.” 

There was a bustle of people moving around. It took about ten minutes for them to roust the right people in the State Security Bureau and make inquiries; they revealed that, in fact, the FSB had opened an inquiry into the personal conduct of several members of the Presidential staff responsible for the nuclear alert systems, because of unusual behaviour observed by their colleagues. 

“Polyjuiced replacements, Excellency,” Gusarov suggested coldly. 

“You may well be right. It’s enough evidence for us to have this conversation. Come on!” Vikhrov waved them on and they went, all together, to the Portkeys; there was one for the Kremlin basement, and that sharp feeling was over in a moment, as a total of eight staffers surrounding the Actual State Councillor followed him through. 

This uniformed crew, even if the uniforms were unusual, was accepted by the Kremlin security as they responded to their arrival. They had the right passes, they looked like they knew what they were doing. From time to time, Vikhrov had been seen before. So they made their way to the Presidential  Office.  There was a brief dispute with the Guards, and the Actual State Councillor’s wand flickered. 

There was no more resistance, and the group stepped inside. Larissa couldn’t help but grimace. Her great country had already lost so much of its people and territory; the fall of communism had been purchased at a very great price. This was the man responsible for that dissolution, and he clearly drunk at his desk. She stood back, a junior officer in the group of MinKol personnel who had followed Vikhrov, and watched the two men argue. A chill seemed to settle over the room.  _ We’re running out of time.  _

It was not her place to make that decision.  She was a helpless fly on the wall as the minutes ticked away. Then the phone rang—the special phone, which came from the Ministry of Defence. 

“ _Yes?_ ” Yeltsin demanded. “I am having an argument with this clown in uniform, what’s wrong Igor Dmitriyevich!?”

Yeltsin’s red-flushed face twisted into a grimace as the answer was shouted back. “What do you mean, the Americans have launched nuclear weapons? We’re  _ at peace _ ! I--” 

Larissa also stood there as a fly on the wall and watched as Vikhrov hit the President of the Russian Federation with the Imperious Curse. Yeltsin relaxed immediately. There was a moment of confused yelling into the phone, and then it hung up. 

“You will call Igor Dmitriyevich back, and order the Strategic Rocket Forces and the Air Force to alert! The Moscow defences must be put to the highest readiness!” Vikhrov outright commanded Yeltsin; now, it was obeyed. 

The President under his control, called back Sergeyev, who was probably terrified during the abrupt period of silence, the President hanging up on him during a missile alert. “Put the Strategic Rocket Forces on the highest alert, Igor Dmitriyevich. Prepare all defensive measures  and authorise them to open fire . I’ll see you in the bunker.” He got up, but nearly fell again. Gusarov rushed forward to help keep Yeltsin from falling over; the group of wizards and witches began to hustle him out of his office. 

When they arrived in the bunker below the Kremlin, the Security Council had already begun to gather. They were not all there; some were being sent to one of the Il-80 Aimaks to get airborne before Moskva would come under attack.  There was a short, slight, but very cool and determined looking man at the head of the Security Council—V. V. Putin, the head of the FSB. 

He looked at Vikhrov, and Vikhrov looked back at him. “I see you are here in our hour of need,  Anton Vladimirovich,”  Putin acknowledged after a moment. “The President?” 

“I am here,” Yeltsin said, rather distantly, as he moved to sit. Putin frowned. 

A great number of the other members of the Security Council were confused by the presence of Vikhrov and his staff. Putin managed this before it could become a problem. “They are part of a special classified bureau,” he noted. “State Councillor Vikhrov has authority at this meeting.” 

The military staff had the controls equipment carrying the launch and communications codes. The screens were illuminated with information about the missile launches. The assessment was that they now had sixty-two minutes until the missiles arrived at Moskva. It was a full-scale preemptive launch by the Americans. 

“Only the British arsenal has been launched,” Vikhrov interjected. “The regime there is manipulating the results. We are confident they have agents within the early warning system. We’re facing a hundred warheads, not three thousand. Have we been able to raise the American President through the direct line?” 

“That’s ridiculous!” Sergeyev exploded. “We KNOW it’s an American launch. I served with the Strategic Rocket Forces while these systems were implemented, they are absolutely reliable! We are wasting time, if we do not retaliate our nation will be destroyed. So far it’s only the American ICBMs…”

A nother staff officer came in. “Your Excellency, we’ve detected a second round of launches from the American ICBM force.” 

Putin looked with interest at Vikhrov, who nodded to Gusarov. Larissa’s immediate boss stepped forward. “Gentlemen, the Americans took the bait. They have no equivalent coordination between their Magical Congress of the United States and the United States government. They had no way to prevent this…”

“ _MAGICAL!?_ What kind of fucking nonsense is this! The country is under nuclear attack! Who are these people!” Sergeyev was demanding. 

Vikhrov suddenly turned and pointed his wand to Sergeyev, hitting the Defence Minister with a revealing charm. He disappeared and was replaced with a short, dark-haired man, already going for his wand. 

Gusarov got to him first with a well-aimed  _ Stupefy,  _ followed immediately by an  _ Expellarmius  _ which disarmed him. 

Yeltsin, still under the Imperious Curse, was waiting for more instruction. Putin leaned back in interest as the muttering reached a fever-pitch. With a single sharp command, he silenced it all. “The FSB is already aware of these matters. We do not have time to argue about them.”

The chaos, tension, and fear were all palatable in the room. Gusarov was shaking his head. “Excellencies, if the Defence Minister of the Russian Federation was replaced by one of Voldemort’s goons, then, … The Americans with their split government don’t stand a chance. They have launched.”

“Then we must decide what to do, and quickly. Voldemort?” Putin asked.

“The name of the real power behind the coup in Britain. Previously, the wizarding world had refused to permit any nation of the world from being ruled by Wizards; but this man seized power, and now directly rules Britain, from behind the scenes. He means to expand his power.”

In the mean-time, Vikhrov had directed his one aide—Marina Ivanovna—to interrogate the Dark Lord’s agent. She was doing so with a ruthless application of Legilimency. The men at the table were arguing about what to do. Whether or not they should retaliate.

“If this Voldemort has seized control of the wizarding government of the Americas, which is possible, then we must assume that the American SSBNs and bombers will follow their initial attack. We must destroy as many of their nuclear weapons as possible on the ground,” Putin at last observed, coldly, very matter-of-fact. “We must have at least a limited counterforce strike, Anton Vladimirovich. Under their own will or not, the Americans have now launched nuclear weapons at us. And, based on these latest updates, the Chinese as well.”

Vikhrov closed his eyes, and Larissa shuddered, knowing, quite well, that since he was in charge of Yeltsin through one of the Unforgivables, it was actually his decision. Then he nodded once, quick and cold. “The minimal application of force required to destroy the remaining American nuclear arsenal must be used.” With a subtle nod… Yeltsin approximately repeated the words.

For a long moment, Putin shot the head of MinKol a very cold and very knowing look, then he addressed the President. “We’ll implement the attack plan immediately.”

“There is a problem, Sirs,” one of the uniformed service personnel arrived, everything was a problem at the moment, but each new messenger seemed to bring another one. The creaking system, eight years of collapse and cuts, was trying to save the nation in inadequate circumstances. “The RKO headquarters at Timonovo is not answering. The missile defence network for Moskva will not be active…”

For a moment, the bomb shelter was as quiet as a tomb.

Vikhrov looked to his subordinates, his expression chiselled in iron. “Councillor Gusarov, go to Timonovo immediately. It’s clear they intend to gut our government, so that the rest of the Russian wizarding community will follow Voldemort. Moskva and  Sankt-Peterburg  must be defended at all costs. See to it personally.”

Gusarov turned back to face her. “Come on, apparate with me, I know the RKO headquarters, and we’ll get a squad of Oprichniki from headquarters in case there is serious opposition.”

Abruptly, she wasn’t a fly on the wall again. _Oprichniki._ The mysterious enforcers at the top of the MinKol hierarchy; somewhere between British Aurors and Unspeakables.

_Well, if we ever need them, tonight is the night. The night of fire._ She reached out to take her commander’s hand, and was dragged straight into the war. If the first salvo was from British submarines, they only had thirty minutes left before they hit Moskva--which meant they had fifteen minutes in which to bring the A-135 batteries on-line.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided it would be appropriate to introduce Larissa here, as certainly the most important of the original characters in this universe. 
> 
> MACUSA accepts an exceptionally dangerous configuration of government. Because of Rappaport's law, it is not integrated with the US Government, and therefore has much less ability to respond to wizarding influence over the muggle authorities.


	3. An Alarc'h

The  spell of normalcy in the end should have been recognised for what it was.  But normalcy had a very real spell to it. It was a kind of magic so subtle, and yet more evil than any spell of the Dark Arts. It whispered ‘complacency’ to those ensorcelled by it. It was easy for Narcissa to think about marrying her handsome young Dragon to some Beauxbatons graduate, to even start looking. To lean back on the wealth stashed at various country-houses in France, and start to rebuild life for the two of them. 

To never, ever, ever think about what they had done to her poor Lucius. About what the Dark Lord had done to him. To think about it anyway. To cry herself to sleep, because she could very much remember exactly what had been done to Lucius, in those days before she had met up with her sister. 

To be thankful that she had her sister and to hate the fact that a respectable pureblood marriage for Draco required her to keep her sister at arm’s length. To wonder if it was really worth it, if they could perhaps just move further afield and find a part of the world where a half-blood cousin for Draco would be overlooked by the family he was marrying into. 

No, she was never quite back to normal. Never would be, without the man she loved in her bed at night, a feature that she shared with Andromeda, for all Narcissa had despised the man who had taken her away. No, they were united in loss now. Loss, and the knowledge that over there, over on the other side of the lines, was their third sister, their eldest, the one who had protected them when they were young.

The right-hand woman of the monster who had now caused them both so much suffering.  The right hand woman of the man now invading Europe. She nodded to the warning image in the fireplace which had triggered her reverie. “We will be there at once.”

_ All wizards within Bretagne must report to the centre of Brest at once. All wizards within Bretagne must report to the centre of Brest at once…  _

Narcissa remembered messages like that from the drills in her childhood. “Draco, come to me at once!” 

She wasn’t a Frenchwoman, and she wasn’t under the orders of the French Ministry, except as a resident foreigner. By rights, she could just as well flee, and Narcissa felt a deep unease, for  _ that  _ message, that  _ mandatory  _ message, could only mean one awful thing. 

_ When all wizards come together this can be stopped, in a local area.  _ The nightmare scenario. The one which had given Bella nightmares all those years before when she was a little girl first growing up. 

“Mother?” Draco was pale in the best of times. He was, indeed, like a perfect statue in hues of white. Pausing at the bottom of the stairs in their manor, he looked composed in black robes, but her haste had given him a electric shock—a feeling of fear spreading.

She stepped over to his side. “We must apprate to Brest, and quickly. The Dark Lord has begun his attack on the muggle world, I fear.” 

“Mother…” His eyes widened, senses sharped.

“My dragon, be _brave,_ ” Narcissa turned to her son and took his hands. “We are facing a muggle weapon. It’s a thing only the muggles could come up with. You can face that, can’t you?” 

D raco stiffened, and squeezed his mother’s hands with a firm nod. Then, she slipped loose her wand-arm and drew it. They apparated a moment later, straight into the heart of the city of Brest. 

For the first time in centuries, in France or anywhere else, magic was practised openly.  Some quizzical gendarmes were blocking traffic. In the cool night of spring, the climate only moderated by the Bay of Biscay, a group of wizards and witches had gathered.

A knot of two French Unspeakables stood in the middle, with others around them. They raised their wands:

“ _Protego Totalus Magnae… Elektra interruptus!_” They began to chant, performing what was almost a synchronised dance, as blue energy rose from their wands… Narcissa, with the others there, simply cast _Protego_ and the magic of their _Protego_ was drawn up, was gathered together. Around the Recouvrance, the Breton quarter just across the river Penfeld from the Chateau de Brest, the energy and power of many witches and wizards was being drawn together by the intense activity of the two unspeakables. 

A horrible, pulsing noise—a  _ siren— _ was echoing through the city from end to end. People milled about in confusion, not believing that this could happen, not in this day and age, not a decade after the ‘end of the cold war’, wasn’t it supposed to bring peace? Who was responsible? Was it to be a conventional attack, or nuclear? There were not enough bomb shelters, there was not enough guidance on where to go. 

A wizard could not actually defend, effectively, against what came next individually. It was travelling at 7.5km/s, a speed at which it required less than twenty seconds from reentry to impact the city. Nor did they have enough power to physically shield an entire city. 

What they did, simply, was neutralise the detonator. Conventional explosives, timers, impact sensors, altitude sensors, these were all part of the nuclear warhead. Without energy coursing through them…

There was simply a flash in the sky from the intersection of the shield and the reentry vehicle, and a terrible thud of an impact to the east. But no nuclear hellfire. No bright flash, not like those which could be seen further away. The flashes which were now beginning to appear, impossibly bright, on the horizon throughout Europe.

Then came the second. The third. The forth. It only went on for ten minutes, there was no more than that, two groups of two each. That was what Brest had been targeted with. By then, the roar reached them, from the naval base at Lorient to the south.

They stood ready, in the cold and bitter night. Other than the momentary reports of the reentry vehicles slamming into the ground at a very great speed, this war was flashes in the night’s sky, and distant roars of thunder.

Around them, electricity was useless, and the city had gone dark, until slowly and fitfully, some emergency generators were coaxed to start, and dim lights formed, as it would have had in a time before muggle technology, candles and lamps in the places that lacked generators. Still they stood, uncertain as to what would or would not again come.

After the first hour milling around in the darkness, some old people brought to them a thermos filled with coffee, and another one filled with cocoa. They crossed themselves, and mumbled their thanks, as many in Brezhoneg as in French. Narcissa, herself, offered them thanks in term, in Cumbric and French. There was enough of a dim sense of comprehension for another round of thanks. 

T he Tour Tanguy sat above them, dimly recalling ‘An Alarc'h’, the Swan, the days when this land was different from France. The sky was charged with strange energies, and even the muggles could see them, like the Northern Lights, but plainly magical—as the world was wounded, its energy responded in ways too blatant to ignore.

“What have we done?” Draco whispered, looking up at the sky. 

His mother shrugged tiredly. “Saved Brest, my Dragon.”  _ We did this, the Wizarding world did this,  _ she thought, but there was no point in humouring a foul mood in Draco.  _ Stay focused on what matters.  _ Now I pray to the Gods that Andy came through all right.” 

“Are those…” Draco trailed off, looking sharply in the distance. 

“Cities,” Narcissa whispered. “Those are cities, Draco.”

Around them, in the night, the bells of the churches began to ring. The people who had gathered were singing Ave Maria. The wide world was dying, but tonight, in a straight moment of peace, a subdued, quiet, and anticlimactic battle had been fought— and yet oh so momentous, for the simple outcome. The utter ruination of this place had been averted. Brest lived.

And Narcissa silently prayed to Gods older than the one of the Cathedrals, that she should see her sister again. For her second sister, somewhere at Voldemort's side? She wasn't sure if she should pray that she had lived, or pray that she had died.   



	4. Electric Funeral

Hermione had not let herself rest. She had insisted that she needed to be involved in efforts to rally the world against Voldemort from the moment that she had arrived in France. But Voldemort’s supporters had quickly seized the governments of several other wizarding societies on the continent. The International Wizarding bodies of governance had been paralysed. The French Ministry had badly wanted the British exiles to do nothing.

She had been stuffed away in Thionville, in Lorraine near Metz. The dense population of the Moselle valley meant the shining lights of the towns and cities stretched off to the south toward Metz, and in the north, the glow of Luxembourg could be dimly seen. They lived with Molly and Andromeda and Tonks in a rented apartment building, and tried to make the best of it.

There had only been one assassination attempt against her, and Andromeda had managed to drive off the attackers long enough for French Aurors to arrive. She wasn’t really sure what it meant to her life, at this point, that she counted one assassination attempt as ‘only’, and therefore a good thing, but it was what existence at come to for Hermione. At least her parents were safe in Australia, where Charles was firmly in power and the Australian Ministry was on his side. She had never thought she would support a King before, but at least he stood against Voldemort; that made her re-think everything, when it came to politics.

The night had already been swirling with rumours. For the past few days, supporters of Voldemort had been fanning out through wizarding communities, encouraging them to muster tonight. Fearing mass violence, Andromeda and Tonks had distributed guns and arms to augment their wands with, and prepared to have everyone mass outside where they could more easily respond to an attack. They had rented the Chateau de la Grange on the north end of the city, for what was officially, to the muggles, a camping trip. That would remove them from their known location, in case it became a target.

Nobody wanted to sleep, and for a while Ron held out hope that nothing would happen, and they’d ultimately just be able to go home. With Molly there, and the somewhat traditional views of sex the wizarding world had, Hermione was sharing a room with Luna and Ginny, and very much not Ron. But for the moment Molly had no problem with them snuggling in front of a camp-fire, Hermione looking over the remnants of the instant meals they’d prepared.

Actually, sometimes Hermione felt she was a little attracted to Luna, as much as the girl was completely daft when she wasn’t being actively disturbing. There was a real intelligence buried there, and she was _cute…_

As much as past memories made her deeply, deeply uncomfortable, Hermione was starting to grapple with the fact that girls were a Thing for her, and there was nothing she could do about it. But she still loved Ron, and that was a _choice._ They would find a way to start a life, somewhere, at some point.

And then the sun came up. The sky to the east was filled with a terrible raging fire, a sphere of light which rapidly evolved into a column of flame rising into the perfectly capped cloud which left no doubt of what it was. A few of the young wizards and witches were screaming. “ _my eyes, my eyes, God my eyes!”_ One of them was shouting.

Andromeda burst out of the tent next to them as Ron whipped around desperately in confusion and shock. Tonks was at her side. She looked to the east, and froze for a moment, a wooden, chilled expression crossing her face, as Tonks, her hair turning black, followed her gaze with an expression of blank horror.

“To your feet, all of you!” Andromeda cried. “Molly, do you remember it?”

Molly Weasley had leapt to her feet. She looked to the north. _There,_ they both saw a glimmering blue half-sphere, coming approximately from where the city of Luxembourg should be. There was a green crack across the surface.

 _Something descending._ Hermione knew enough, science-fiction, science fact, movies—something descending from orbit.

What the euphemisms of technical language called a ‘reentry vehicle.’

“They do,” Molly noted. “Yes, I do, Andy. CHILDREN, it’s called _Protego Totalus Magnae… Elektra interruptus!_ _!_ Now, all together, we must link our magic!”

“Hermione, what’s going on, what’s going on, what’s going on? ” Ron asked desperately, looking wide to the sky, where he could see the rising columns from other places, the distant flashes.

“Do what your mother says now Ron, it’s our only chance,” Hermione raised her wand skyward. “It’s the end of the world. Nuclear War.”

 _Protego Totalus Magnae… Elektra Interruptus!_ Andromeda and Molly synchronised themselves in vocalising it. They gathered together the magic of many declarations of Protego. Around Thionville, a shimmering shield began to form. And there was a crack, when a nuclear device tried to slip against the southern part. A green flash. Perhaps it had been aimed against Metz. No definitive way to manifest this spell existed, but it had been developed for precisely this reason, to let a group of wizards …

Defend against that which in the late 20  th  century had transformed from the impossible into the sickeningly likely. The world had convinced itself, but… One… Hermione thought, to the south. We got one…

This wasn’t some random madness. Britain had nukes. Voldemort had nukes. Then a second bomb came in, and detonated, not in Thionville, but twenty-five kilometres to the south, a clear attempt to hit Metz. In the direction of the city, everything vanished.

Molly sharply shifted to cast a night spell, unvocalised, with the flick of her wrist. It saved them all from blindness, and Tonks stepped up to join her mother in maintaining the defensive shield over Thionville. As the mushroom cloud rose ominously over them, Hermione felt an aching, horrifying hollow deep inside of herself.

Tonks gave voice to what she was thinking, as the red boiling cloud, flashing lightning around the surface, rose in the characteristic mushroom form. “Gods. Voldemort did this, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he had to, Britain has nukes, he had to have at least started it,” Andy nodded, grimly looking to the south. “He’s started a war with the entire world.”

“What does that mean, what’s happening there?” Ron asked, and Hermione could feel, in his voice, how deeply devastated he was by this. He was dimly grasping what those with more experience in the muggle world knew now as an absolutely horrifying fact.

Hermione swallowed dryly. “It means hundreds of millions of people are dying right now, Ron. And with everything Wizardkind is doing to save ourselves from the Bomb, the Statute of Secrecy is broken.”

“There’s people down there, a city, what’s happening to them ‘Mione, what’s happening to them!?”

“They’re dying.”

She felt him leave her side. Felt him dash forward, spin, raise his wand. Molly spun – “DON’T YOU DARE!”

But it was too late, Ron apparated straight for Metz, to save anyone he could, while the dissipated intensity of the shockwave ruffled the air around them, and laughed at their hopes and dreams for the world.

Hermione’s heart fell into the very base of her stomach. She knew people could survive much closer to a nuclear blast. It wasn’t that. It was the death of any last innocence. While the war had remained in the wizarding world, she could convince herself that most of the world was experiencing a normal life. When it was contained in Britain, she could walk around France and see normal people, still having normal aspirations. Now the whole world was at war. Nothing would ever be normal again.

And Ron, full of guilt at Harry’s death, at defeat, had gone straight into the fire to try and help. Hermione held back, she didn’t immediately follow him, but she looked hard at Molly and Andromeda and Tonks. She was old enough to make this choice herself, but they all needed to make it. “We need to go after him. Not just to keep him safe. To save anyone we can. Even in the parts of the Moselle Valley not hit, the hospitals will quickly become overwhelmed. And people will blame Wizards for this, when they find out the truth of what happened. We need to go. We need to save as many people as we can. It’s our obligation. We couldn’t stop Voldemort, we couldn’t stop this, but we can save his victims. We have to try!”

To her surprise, the three women glanced between each other. There was no disagreement.

Andromeda Tonks, far too much like Bellatrix in appearance for Hermione’s comfort, brushed her hair back, faced whatever demons she was facing—and perhaps they were all named Bellatrix in that moment, knowing her sister’s possible role in this—and looked again to the south where the mushroom cloud at last began to dissipate. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Electric Funeral" is of course a reference to the Black Sabbath song by that name, the first verse going as:
> 
> Reflex in the sky warn you you're gonna die  
> Storm coming, you'd better hide from the atomic tide  
> Flashes in the sky turns houses into sties  
> Turns people into clay, radiation minds decay


	5. The Shield of the City

**Timonovo RKO Headquarters,**

**Greater Moscow Area**

**15 March, 1999**

The chain of apparation had been sickening. They had gone straight to MinKol headquarters together, Councillor Gusarov and herself. For the first time, Larissa would be fighting alongside of the feared enforcers of MinKol…

_For the first time, you’ll be fighting, period._

The stakes were so high that anyone except a monster would fight, though. And so they apparated again, with Larissa first hastily casting a charm on herself to help from vomiting.  A wrenching chain apparation, and then they were in front of Timonovo RKO headquarters, having found themselves blocked from entering directly by some kind of magical shield thrown up at the facility. 

“Well, that wasn’t good, Sir.”

“Fuck, no,” Gusarov muttered. “They’re here in strength. Quickly!” He dashed for the entrance, personnel, where the guards levelled rifles with particularly blank expressions. Larissa, who had studied the dark arts, felt she knew those expressions. A simple _Stupefy_ would not work.

S o Larissa spun out of line, and hit them with an upward-cast body binding spell and then a downward cast in short succession, disabling both men. 

Councillor Gusarov shot a glance back at her. “Larissa Sergeivna!?”

“ _Imperio,_ ” she explained, describing their condition. The Imperious Curse. Her boots skittering on gravel, she caught up with the mad rush. Her commander’s wand overcame the armoured defences of the command post, and their boots pounded across the floors. Down, down into the heart of the bunker. Each of the doors they blasted off, though, made her feel just a bit more uncomfortable. “The bunker will be useless, if anything gets through!”

“I know, but we won’t let anything through, will we?” 

It was a challenge. And a reassurance. There was only one response for that. “ _Urrah!_ ” 

They ran into the first group of enemies. These men had not faced MinKol’s Oprichniki before, with nothing to hold them back. Larissa saw two of the team work spells that let them pass through the heavy concrete walls to flank the position of these wizards, who had seized the command post of their capital. She quickly cast a sharp  _“_ Protego!” to deflect their defensive attacks and keep them engaged with the enemy in front of them. 

When the traitors were distracted by the surprise flank attack, Larissa and Gusarov shifted to the attack. Cutting spells forced the enemy on the defensive. Then a man in uniform appeared behind them, and she watched one of the enemy wizards collapse in a well of blood as the boom of a gun ripped through the corridor. 

Her cutting spell and Gusarov’s intersected on the other, and sectioned him as neatly as a butchered hog.  Two more had their bodies outright vanish in flashes of light, as the Oprichniki turned their power on them. God knew what they had done. 

Gusarov looked up to the man. There was a hesitation, an uncertainty on his face, wondering about the MinKol wizards and witches in front of him—Larissa could see it:  _Are they friend or foe?_ It was nothing more complicated, but still, that was a very dangerous question.

“Comrade,” Councillor Gusarov spoke, with a disarming familiarity and informality. “We’ve got to get the defensive batteries operational again. Moscow is under nuclear attack.” Whomever it was had avoided being controlled by the enemy. He had fought back when the opportunity presented itself. That was all one could ask, and more, when muggles faced wizards sent to kill.

Larissa could only imagine it, in that single fraught moment, what someone would have to decide—but the answer was obvious. If they were enemies, he was no worse off than he had been thirty seconds before. If they were comrades, loyal soldiers of Russia in their own way, then the information they had was accurate, and the situation was desperate. 

The soldier spun on heel. “This way, quickly!” He led them at dead run down the last corridor, the last set of stairs into the main vault. With a forward guard of wizards, those in the command centre had not thought to secure the door—the infantile mistake of overconfident, arrogant men who never thought muggles could threaten them, who didn’t care to learn something as simple as the interlocking latch on a nuclear vault. 

They paid for it.

The battle of spells was short, sharp, savage.  In the magical duel the art of combat was to begin the next spell even as you completed the last. The carry-through of the motion to cast magic must become the motion to cast magic.  _Life is like a wheel._ And her spells were much the same, muscles snapping through motions of her whole body—initiated by her hips, shoulders shifting, arm moving with momentum. 

It was over so fast that she was almost embarrassed. Larissa barely got to the seventh spell, before having to quickly end the motion of her wand, seeing that there was one of the Oprichniki in front of her, not an enemy. She coughed, only then realising her body was aching, her breath straining against her chest. Actually, she had been in one of the most physically exhausting five minutes in her life, and she hadn’t even realised it at the time it had happened. 

Blood mingled with bodies and a wafted scent of charred flesh in front of her. 

Those robed and cowled figures, their allies but still scary for what they were were, their  _enforcers,_ who had kept the name of Ivan Grozny’s secret police establishment long after it had been disestablished, walked the ranks of the confused, insensate, or Imperioused soldiers, releasing them from the bonds of their curses. 

The alarms which had just been the background noise of the cacophony of battle to Larissa, took on an ominous and horrifying note to those men as they regained their wits. They began to implement the necessary commands, even with shouts of horror, to activate the computers. It seemed like it would be much too late, but it was do or die, and that was the kind of moment where brave men found their courage, and even weak men put in the last bit of effort to make themselves count.

_And women._ Larissa smiled, and stepped to Councillor Gusarov’s side. “Have we done it?” 

“We’ve at least given the city a fighting chance. We’ll die on our feet.” He pitched his voice to carry. “Come on. We’ll provide Timonovo all the cover we can. Let’s go!”

“Now remember,” Gusarov instructed as they made a short disapparation to the surface, and Larissa’s stomach wrenched once more, but she held herself together, a neophyte to combat no longer. “We will need to protect ourselves from our own defensive missile detonations just as much as the enemy bombs.”

They turned their wands skyward, and found themselves shielding against both ‘leakers’ and the sudden brilliant flash of the nuclear-tipped defensive missiles, whose shining light promised life to the City of Moscow. 

It took three hours for the attacks to end. Body trembling from head to toe, it was then, and only then, that Larissa sank down and wept. She wasn’t the only one. 

It was only the first day of the war, but in nuclear combat, surviving the first day mattered for a great deal.  They had done exactly what they needed to do—give their country a fighting chance in the struggle to come.


	6. The Line

How do you explain to your daughter that it’s the end of the world, and that her father ordered it to happen? Bellatrix, who thought she cared for and feared nothing, didn’t have the faintest idea of how to approach it. Fortunately, she didn’t have to, at least, not yet; Delphini was not quite two years old, and had no idea of what was going on around her.

So Bellatrix held her daughter, kissed her, and cast a little sleeping spell. Within a moment, Delphini was fast asleep, and she stepped out of her room.

“Come on, Euphemia,” she gestured to the woman who had taken in her daughter, on the Dark Lord’s command. “We’ve got work to do, and if we fail… If we fail, we all fail.”

“They say it will be the night of the Dark Lord’s victory, Lady Bellatrix,” Euphemia said, in an exited, anxious state, as they stepped out into the street in Berwick-upon-Tweed in heavy robes against the spring chill of the night.

“Maybe,” Bellatrix answered, quietly looking skyward.

“Maybe? How could it _not_?”

“We’ve already begun unleashing nuclear weapons,” Bellatrix answered, her voice distant, trance-like. “The most powerful thing the muggle world has ever made. They will be crossing the globe now, and each one can incinerate a small city, twenty will destroy the largest urban area in the world. They climb into space itself, and then descend to detonate with the power of the sun, contained with hunks of metal. An insidious kind of magic, that the muggles think for their technology, then poisons the land around, and causes people to die without apparent wounds. And they have tens of thousands of them, and we did this to make them all fly. They’ll smash cities across the globe. It won’t be millions of muggles that die, but billions. And, wizards will die with them. Any unlucky wizards too close, wizards in cities we decide not to defend. Magical communities will be poisoned, and magical creatures will fall dead from the fallout as it spreads across the land. Most of them will turn against us.” 

Her voice was absolutely cold as she joined the other wizards in the midst of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Here in Britain, the muggle population already knew to fear them. The rest of the world was about to learn just how important that was, but they hadn’t quite, yet. 

“When their civilisation is disrupted and half-dead, when billions of muggles have been slain, then, the rest will fight. They’ll pick up whatever is left, and attack us with it, every way they can. There are populations of wizards who will certainly join them. Anyone who thinks it will demoralise them into surrender is a fool. We’ll conquer a lot, in the initial months, following the shock of the attacks. Then, with growing strength, they’ll fight. They’ll send the old into the irradiated cities to salvage what is useful. They’ll mobilise the children in their rural areas. They’ll drag every weapon they have out. I’ve seen their cleverness, when I worked with the muggles at Dungeness. No, no, Euphemia. The war doesn’t end today.” 

Bellatrix’s eyes glinted, hard and cold. “The war begins tonight. All the work we have in His service is in front of us.” 

“Muggles haven’t the courage to do such things as you say!” 

“Oh stuff it,” Bellatrix laughed. “I’ve seen them toss on their ‘hazmat’ gear and go into a reactor—spewing this invisible death into the sky. Stupid, dirty, smelly muggles, the fucking people who made those death machines in the first place. Good riddance to them. Aye, we’ll kill billions. But they’ll _fight,_ Euphemia, mark my words. Even a beast in a trap fights. Muggles are beasts, sure. But have you ever hunted? I’ve hunted, Euphemia. Beasts fight. They’ll fight.” 

The woman grew silent and pale, rather than argue back. 

Bellatrix felt the Dark Mark burn. It was not a call but a signal. She raised her wand to the sky. “Now, to power the ley lines—now!” She called. The other wizards and witches in the group obeyed her, necessarily; she commanded everyone in this group. She was the only Death Eater, and that she was here at all in this small city was something that should be considered honour enough. They reached out with their wands, and the power of the magical cores of each and every one of them, and directed it out to the natural lay lines of the area. 

With them were tens of thousands of other witches and wizards in the British Isles. Attendance was mandatory, enforced by the Dark Lord’s Government. Their power came together into the sky above, and slowly, a glowing green shield began to form above them. Bellatrix wondered at the tint, as she felt the power pulse through her. Perhaps a gesture from Her Lord. Green was very much His colour, and she suspected he was charging the defence in some way.

Likely through human sacrifice. 

_Well isn’t that what this? One great human sacrifice to usher in our new Dark Avalon?_ Bellatrix trembled with emotion. There was a part of her, a real and true part, the darkest part, that was still celebrating their triumph over the world, for all she knew that the war had only begun, that she would still be called to live up to her name, to be  _Bellatrix,_ the Warrior, one more time, and perhaps more intensely than she ever had before. There was another part of her that raged against the use of these monstrous weapons, that knew what it would do to the magical world, that couldn’t believe that, humiliated and subdued, she had just gone here join in the defence and make no more protest. 

But, she was saving magical Britain from the consequences. By raising her wand to the sky that night, she joined in the shield, she joined in the guard, the magical line that would hold their islands clean and pure, untouched by the nuclear hellfire. Tonight, on this Night of Fire, to hold her power skyward was unquestionably Right. 

She laughed, for all that she cared about Right. 

She laughed, as the flashes began, and she let her power surge and flare through the lines, glowing in the sky, of almost a hundred thousand wizards and witches united in one force and purpose. She laughed, and laughed, and cackled, for death, for ruin, for despair, for triumph and for the savage war to come. 

And the laughter only ended when she remembered the daughter left in Rowle’s townhouse, and the memory forced her to wonder what kind of world had just been created, for the life she had brought forth.

**Author's Note:**

> Dungeness A is a MAGNOX reactor, perfectly capable for weapons production, but quite old and ultimately decommissioned in 2007.
> 
> Certain dialogue was, at least in an initial form I subsequently modified, suggested by Wardown.


End file.
